Just a question. Has the forum been offline for a while? I haven't been able to come here for a long time. I tried to find the forum all sorts of ways but nothing worked, I got a message that there was a problem. To my surprise it works again today !

I am just curious, was it a problem of the forum or was it just my computer?

Just a question. Has the forum been offline for a while? I haven't been able to come here for a long time. I tried to find the forum all sorts of ways but nothing worked, I got a message that there was a problem. To my surprise it works again today !

I am just curious, was it a problem of the forum or was it just my computer?

No....... I'm going to two!!!!! At least, that's the plan.... I have tickets for Liverpool & Salford, as they're pretty much the same distance from here, but I note from Ed's page that concerts in Europe have been cancelled over the last week due to an "emergency medical situation", so it remains to be seen how things pan out. (See http://www.clannad.nl/2014/02/clannad-c ... elled.html)

Moya, if you happen to look in on this - whatever has happened, I'm sure I speak for everyone on the forum in saying the whole family is in our thoughts and prayers.

Hi all, in answer to the question of whether the forum has been offline, the answer is 'Sort of'

About 2 or 3 months ago, I wrote a script to block all the spammers that were coming through from Pakistan. Basically, I was visiting this forum and only ever doing 2 things:1) reading posts from legitimate members reporting spam (many thanks to those doing this, by the way)2) Dealing with the spam.

So I set about writing a script to ban the spamming domains using the ban list. What I didn't count on was the sheer processing power needed due to a large attack coming in from China - all automated spam registrations, all being blocked by the CAPTCHA system we have in place.

Essentially, this meant that the Chinese spammers were launching a DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack against the forum, with the result that it often went offline, although it was sporadically up.

So over the last week or so I removed that ban list, wrote to Admin about it, and asked him to get in touch with the hosting company with a view to getting them to implement some better form of spam protection.

So far, we've had no more spammers register, but at least the board is working OK again.

Apologies for the inconvenience caused - let's hope this can continue as normal now!

I'll be looking into how we can grant moderators the right to remove spam so they can deal with it on sight rather than always having it wait around until I can get here.

If you don't know what eschatology is then don't worry; it's not the end of the world.Purveyor of fine sarcasm since 1966.

Thank you very much for the explanation Angus. I hope we won't have so much problems with spam anymore... I am indeed glad that the forum is working again. Thanks for all your hard work. I believe most of us don't notice that until something goes wrong!

And Dave, I also saw the message on Ed's page and I wonder what is going on. I hope everything will be fine again and the person in question will be well soon.

For you, I hope your concerts won't be cancelled Dave! 2 Clannad concerts, that must be so great! Hearing all those wonderful new songs from Nadur live must be amazing!

Thanks for the update, Angus - fingers crossed things improve if the hosting company improve protection at their end, but as you say, if mods can be granted the ability to create "Spammer on toast", it should at least spread the workload a bit!

Yvonne - it looks as though the tour has resumed now, so next week is looking hopeful. That said, of course, the family need to put their needs first, so we'll just wait and see how events unfold over the week.